SOUTH-EAST ASIA, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE CHINESE.

The article discusses various issues related to race relations in South-East Asia with reference to Chinese. Authors proposes in this survey to illustrate some of the problems which have arisen by dealing with the case of the Overseas Chinese, who, by their numbers and economic and political importance, have occasioned a body of writing which must have its interest for students of race relations. But the Overseas Chinese are not the only illuminating case offered by South-East Asia. They are paralleled to some extent by the Indians, the Eurasians pose the problem of the stranded remnants of foreign overlordship, in the indigenous minorities authors had illustrations of the difficulties arising from the attempts to integrate religious, cultural, and racial groups into modernizing state-communities. Authors' rapid survey of the Chinese in South-East Asia has assumed so far that the Chinese in each country form a self-contained unit with its own problems. In fact, it is only by accepting nationalist prejudices that one could continue to hold this view. The erection of national barriers, across which men, goods, and money can travel often only with difficulty, is historically recent, it imposes a new immobility on the Chinese which obscures what remains of their old regional ties.